The universe isn't cognitive.
This processing conforms to a state transition function included in a set of such functions known as "the laws of physics". Calling these functions "cognitive" is hardly a stretch, since it is largely in terms of such functions that cognition itself is understood. Moreover, since "the characteristics, the features, ... the behaviors of the many facets and elements of this reality" are generally attributed to the laws of physics, it is not clear why cognition should not generally apply. After all, spacetime consists of events and separations, and events can be described as the mutual processing of interacting objects. So where physical interaction is just mutual input-to-output behavioral transduction by physical objects, and cognition is mutual input-to-output behavioral transduction by neurons and their inclusive brain structures, physical interaction is just a generalization of human cognition. If this seems like a tautology, indeed it is; self-contained self- referential systems are tautological by definition. * Suppose you're wearing blue-tinted glasses. At first, you think that the world you see through them is blue. Then it occurs to you that this need not be true; maybe it's the glasses. Given this possibility, you realize that you really have no business thinking that the world is blue at all; indeed, due to Occam's razor, you must assume that the world is chromatically neutral (i.e., not blue) until proven otherwise! Finally, managing to remove your glasses, you see that you were right; the world is not blue. This, you conclude, proves that you can't assume that what is true on your end of perception (the blue tint of your lenses) is really true of reality. Fresh from this victory of reason, you turn to the controversial hypothesis that mind is the essence of reality...that reality is not only material, but mental in character. An obvious argument for this hypothesis is that since reality is known to us strictly in the form of ideas and sensations - these, after all, are all that can be directly "known" - reality must be ideic. But then it naturally occurs to you that the predicate "mental" is like the predicate "blue"; it may be something that exists solely on your end of the process of perception. And so it does, you reflect, for the predicate "mental" indeed refers to the mind! Therefore, by Occam's razor, it must be assumed that reality is not mental until proven otherwise. However, there is a difference between these two situations. You can remove a pair of blue sunglasses. But you cannot remove your mind, at least when you're using it to consider reality. This means that it can never be proven that the world isn't mental. And if this can never be proven, then you can't make an assumption either way. Indeed, the distinction itself is meaningless; there is no reason to even consider a distinction between that which is mental and that which is not, since nature has conspired to ensure that such a distinction will never, ever be perceived. But without this distinction, the term "mental" can no longer be restrictively defined. "Mental" might as well mean "real" and vice versa. And for all practical purposes, so it does. A theory T of physical reality exists as a neural and conceptual pattern in your brain (and/or mind); it's related by isomorphism to its universe U (physical reality). T<--(isomorphism)-->U. T consists of abstract ideas; U consists of supposedly concrete objects like photons (perhaps not the best examples of "concrete objects"). But the above argument shows that we have to drop the abstract-concrete distinction (which is just a different way of expressing the mental-real distinction). Sure, we can use these terms to distinguish the domain and range of the perceptual isomorphism, but that's as far as it goes. For all practical purposes, what is mental is real, and vice versa. The T-U isomorphism seamlessly carries one predicate into the other.